Valot Kaukaa

Preservation;
2012

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Music from this release

Looming out there somewhere is a unified theory of how noise and distortion came to be fetishized in the digital age. Christian Marclay made a "Record Without a Cover" in 1985, but there were records without covers in collections all across the land, gathering dirt and becoming cracked and impossible to play. But 1s and 0s are forever, so we yearn for the days of imperfection. Nuojuva, the project of Finnish producer Olli Aarni, who previously recorded as Ous Mal, is designed to explore the boundaries between repetition and the unpredictable, analog and digital, clarity and warble.

Tracks on Valot Kaukaa feel like spaces where elements are introduced and allowed to interact instead of compositions where things move from point A to point B. Aarni lays piano, guitar, cello, violin, deeply reverbed and unintelligible vocals, and watery synths on a table and then subjects them to an acid bath of pitch shifts, analog crackle, digital pop, and extreme EQing. While individual sounds are often "distressed," the cumulative effect is lulling and beautiful, making a strong argument for distortion as a reverie-inducing narcotic.

The current figure Nuojuva most resembles in terms of tone and overall affect is Balam Acab, especially given his fondness for liquid sounds that splash against the tracks' container. But where the latter has a strong connection to the beat, Aarni lets his pieces build and unravel away from the rigidity of the grid. So even though Nuojuva shares an approach with Balam Acab, Valot Kaukaa feels less bound to genre, and the introduction of acoustic instruments ties the tracks to a more studied "new music" classical air despite the overall sound seeming very much like the product of a laptop.

The best tracks here have an edge where they seem just about to develop and change and build into a melody but they're barely held back by loops and repetition. "Pihlajan Varjoissa" has a droney background that sounds like a mixture of symphonic samples and stretched ethereal voices, adds some piano runs that sound like they were recorded on a speech cassette on a half-broken tape recorder from 1978, and folds in a winding melodica line that lingers like a half-remembered fragment of dub. "Laakso" has a similar effect, but with the addition of bird sounds and a dollop of vinyl pop. These tracks constantly seem to be gathering themselves to push into something else, a place with linear melodies and chord changes, but they never quite make it there. That lack of fulfillment gives the music a crucial sense of tension, and without it, this stuff would be too pretty and would too easily slip into the background.

Vocals, by Aarni and Rachel Evans of Motion Sickness of Time Travel, also occupy an intriguing in-between space. On "Huominen", a drone enters and you can't tell whether you are listening to a proper voice, a mellotron, or a sample. They float in and out and give a suggestion of humanity without going all-in. Vocals functioning as an additional texture is nothing new, of course, but there is something about how they just float in and around the instruments and refuse to push themselves to the front.

As lovely as Valot Kaukaa is, it's a crowded field for this sort of blurred ambience, and there's no getting around the fact that the album doesn't stand out in any significant way (given how it functions, "standing out" doesn't exactly seem like the point). It's there, but you have to listen hard to find Aarni's voice and how its transmission is garbled in an individual way.